Greenland: Movie Review

Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn

Director: Ric Roman Waugh

Wisely eschewing the whole big budget bloat-fest of the usual disaster movies, Ric Roman Waugh's Greenland is a decidedly more low-key affair with flashes of CGI brutality.

Butler is John Garrity, who's estranged from his wife Allison (Firefly's Baccarin) following an argument too many. As Garrity tries to get back in his family's good books, the world faces the arrival of a comet called Clarke that is on a collision course with Earth.

As fragments begin to reign down, scientists, who initially believed the arrival would only be minor, discover the comet will actually cause an extinction level event, destroying civilisation as we know it.

Racing against time, the Garrity family try to outrun the end of the world...

Greenland is the kind of disaster film that's rarely seen in these days of B-grade blockbuster spectacle, where the FX outshine the human cast and the story.

While it may be a little overlong in its 2 hour run time, and while the script does occasionally overplay the whole end-of-the-world element in a promise of hype that's never quite met amid some final third padding, the film's strength is its focus on the human side.

Never shying away from the Garritys and their domestic problems, as well as the idea of overcoming personal adversity in the face of disaster, Greenland uses its sense of growing dread to focus on the parental problems and the issue of dealing with others misbehaving as societal unrest grows.

Butler and Baccarin make a plausible pair, and the script doesn't demand too much out of them as it plays out. But they make the disaster relatable, and a script that delivers moments of emotion such as when others are left behind, pleading for their lives, certainly does leave a lasting impression and emotional toll on the audience.

Waugh, who directed Butler in Angel Has Fallen, delivers the chaos in an orchestrated and calm fashion, which works in Greenland's favour - as the sense of dread grows as time starts to run out.

Sure, there are a few set pieces and explosions, the majority of which would have been seen in the trailer, but this is not really where Greenland is directing its energy - instead, Greenland is a rare beast of a disaster movie that uses the global crisis to deliver a personal story that has Miracle Mile edges and a highly watchable central core of characters that you end up caring about, despite the broad character strokes and the familiarity of the story.